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This is not from the journal fragments located in Destiny 2. This is Cayde’s journal from The Taken King Collector’s Edition.

“We got issues.

See, the reboots, they don’t wipe it all away. Not everything. And the new life-plus the Light it does something real funny to what’s left. Amplifies it, scrambles it, reshuffles the fragments like a dealers riffling a deck of cards, putting the hands we’ve already won and lost back into play.

Most of us do what we can on our own to forget.

Let the itch go unscratched.

Me? I learned long ago you gotta play the hand your dealt

Floating in the black.

I’ve been listening to nothing but my heart knocking for over twelve hours. EMU’s low on air. I promise myself this job is the last. Promise myself this time I mean it.

I feel the hull vibration through the station’s thin metal skin. The Airlock pump hisses. Long wait’s over. (Clovis Bray symbol)

Time to go to work. I’ll spare you the gory details.

Afterwards fuming. Clovis Bray sends me a bill for the hull damage. My fault the target put a blast wall between us. My fault things went wrong and had to let our rifles do the talking.

I tear the packet open. Tattered pieces of the envelope drift to the floor.

Surprise it’s not just a bill. There’s a job offer tucked in Seems old Bray’s been looking for someone like me. Willing to forgive my debt, and not just for the orbital station. All of it.

Suddenly, I ain’t so mad anymore.

Saturn. No, someplace else. Someplace colder.

This moon has been almost completely converted, a SARCOPHAGUS of ice and iron.

Stone towers run round with glaciers, rooted deep within a heart of snow.

I cam here flesh and bone.

Gave everything to the ice.

Started over

Rebooted.

The Coast is different, beautiful and unbroken and timeless. It teems with new life. Every big brain in the system has their sights set on the Academy.

WE were there for the Ahamkara, parasite reptilian critters that appeared out of thin air. Inexplicable genome, new proteins.
So much potential.

And me? I’m there for her, Dr. Maya Sundaresh. She’s poured into the research on the brink of another breakthrough, focused on devouring every new data point.

Brilliant. Driven. Beautiful. (Ishtar Collective Id Card of Maya Sundaresh)

I can see her so clearly. Dark hair spilt into smoothed shimmering strands fanning over her forehead. Gray irises blooming as she looks up from her work to see me standing there beside her.

Treasure Island
by
Robert Lois Stevenson
Author of “Travels with a donkey” “An Inland Voyage” ETC

No. She doesn’t know me at all, doesn’t even recognize my face even though I’ve been standing over her shoulders for months. I’m nothing more than a fixture, a required imposition. an unwanted necessity.

I’m no egghead, Never was. Just like now, back then I was on a need-to-know basis, and the only thing I need to know is that nothing and nobody gets through the door and past me without at least three layers of security clearance and a whole lot of muscle.

Still. I think about saying something. Saying anything. In a second mind rifles through a trillion possibilities.

But she’s already turned back to her work. I shuffle my feet, straighten my back, and return to mine.

Bounty’s up on the board. Hive Target. Real mean SOB you know the deal.

These horrors live on for just about forever. Only I don’t count what they do as living. They lurk around in the shadows for centuries hoarding knowledge and conjuring up thousands of ways to chew up Light and life.

Doesn’t matter much.
I’ve learned a few tricks myself.

Fast forward a spell. I’m in the guts of it, deep dark cavern deep below the surface. Cant tell exactly where or when. EDZ maybe Doesn’t matter. In any case I’m right where I need to be, tucked into a shadow, camo cloak humming to keep me well out of sight.

Right place. Right time

BAM! I dart out from over, cloak flaring. But from underneath, I lunge, lifting my hand cannon. It barks out orders. Bathes the room in firelight.

You wake up and look into the cold spaces between circuitry (galaxies?), begging for answers.
None Come.

But others voices wait. At your center, safe and untouched, sits the original you. Just a little box touched at the back of a closet, filled with trinkets and odd notions kept for no obvious reason

You have no idea when you last spoke to this tangle but that’s what you do now, using a whisper and the lightless touch being all sorts of cautious because you’re afraid of frightening whatever wants to speak with you.

And then it speaks, and instead of answers, it begins with the only question that matters.

“Do you want to know what happens next?”

Realigning…

This one ain’t mine. It’s someone (something?) else entirely. but its the most important memory I have.

All this time I’ve been busy stirring up the past. Never thought about what I was really after.

Trinkets and odd notions kept for no obvious reason. Do they matter?

(Table of Contents for the book)

Maybe it’s time we let the past alone and climb down from our walls. There’s gotta be treasure that shines brighter than any we’ve been digging up from the bones of our lost world.

Has to be better hand than the one we’ve already played. I say we get after it. See what’s really waiting for us out in that darkness.
Maybe even light it up some.
Dance in the ash and flames.

The Traveler can follow suit if it feels the need to. Otherwise, it can watch over the City for a thousand years.

(Picture of Telesto taped to the book)

anticipation for me. Fair warning for anything down the barrel.

But you and me? We got far more important things to attend to. We’re Guardians, We got a new future to forge.

-Cayde out.